The consideration that needs to be examined here is how important efficiency
is to the end result.

That is not just whether it is ODBC or ADO or ESQL or ...

The database system used has a major effect on performance and this
also depends on how the db is used.

I am having to do some extracts from a system to send to a MSSQL
server. I did some Python that extracted data from a Cobol system and
formatted it up as SQL CREATEs and INSERTs. The text file ran to about
100 Mbyte and then I pushed this into PostgreSQL using psql (batch
command line). The whole thing (extract and load) ran in about 20
minutes on a Linux box - single CPU around 2GHz.

There was only a slow link to the MSSQL server so I extracted a sample
from the test files and this was less than 2Mbytes so I could email
it. It was reported that this sample took 20 minutes to load into
MSSQL on a dual core 3MHz Windows machine.